Digital Shoppers Expect Cross-Channel Consistency

January 27, 2014

By Jack Loechner, MediaPost

According to the findings of a new IBM study of more than 30,000 global consumers, the percentage of consumers willing to share their current location via GPS with retailers nearly doubled year-over-year to 36%. 38% of consumers would provide their mobile number for the purpose of receiving text messages and 32% would share their social handles with retailers.

The study found that the five most important omnichannel capabilities to consumers are, in order:

Price consistency across shopping channels

Ability to ship items that are out of stock in the store directly to their home

Option to track the status of an order

Consistent product assortment across channels

Ability to return online purchases in the store

The report says that consumers fall into four distinct groups differentiated by their interest in and use of social, location and mobile technologies while shopping;

19% of consumers surveyed lag behind the majority of the population when it came to using technology to shop

40% of shoppers use social, location and mobile technologies for information gathering, but are not likely to use them to purchase products

29% use social, location and mobile much more extensively, for everything from researching products to ordering goods

12% of consumers surveyed are classified as "Trailblazers," those who use these technologies across channels and base their choice of retailer on whether they make that possible

Consumers are increasingly shopping online, says the report. In 2013, 84% of shoppers surveyed chose the store to make their last non-grocery purchase. This year, that figure dropped to 72%. Surprisingly, showrooming is not behind this online growth. While more respondents showroomed this year (8% versus 6% last year), only about 30% of all online purchases actually resulted from showrooming, a drop from nearly 50% last year. 70% of online purchases were made by shoppers that went directly to the web.